Trade Show: Long Day, but Good
Sep. 13th, 2023 10:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerI worked a trade show all day today. I began with a bit of apprehension after a rough pre-day yesterday, when it was Partner Day plus booth setup time. Yesterday I left early after finishing things that took way too long. The fact that I needed to be at the show floor early today, at 7:10am to finish setting up for a 7:30 start, also helped start me off feeling chafed. Who TF schedules vendors to start at a software trade show at 7:30am anyway??
I'm glad I arrived 20 minutes ahead of the ridiculously early start time because I needed every minute of it when the computer wouldn't allow my login and I had to go through the password reset process. Three times. But the the clocked ticked to 7:30 and everything came together. I was ready to rock and roll. Two few minutes later the colleague who I was afraid would blow me off for the day arrived and announced he'd be there all day. And he kept his word about that, too! And he was fully present, too! "Fully present" meaning leaning in to talk to people who stopped by the booth, rather than hiding at the back with his nose in his phone screen all day. Plus another colleague who isn't even from sales joined us later in the morning and really helped out chatting with customers and prospects in the booth.
One of the metrics our show efforts live or die by is leads— the number of people whose badges we scan when they visit our booth. On the whole for the day our raw number of leads was low (barely 65 when I personally was hoping for 100+) but the quality was extremely high. I've written before about the phenomenon of "swag hounds", people who don't care what our company does and just want the free giveaways. While at some big trade shows that's 80% of the scans, at this show they were, like, 5%. At this conference we talked to many people who are already customers and had the chance to get them excited about new features and new products. We also talked to a number of prospective customers, employees of specific companies we want to sell to, and had solid chats with them about what their challenges are and how our solutions can help.
It was a long day today. I opened the booth at 7:10am and had it packed up at 5:40pm. That's 10.5 hours later! But time kind of flew due to the quality of leads/conversations and the camaraderie of my colleagues who were "all in" with me in chatting with people who visited the booth.
Alas my day was not done when I left the conference venue at 5:40pm. I still had almost 3 hours of driving Wednesday night to get in place for a customer meeting on Thursday morning! At least before leaving town I met Hawk for dinner at a favorite local pizzeria. Neither of us actually had pizza (I had a chicken parm sub and she had cheese fries) but it was great. After that I hit the road for the last leg of a very long day.
I'm glad I arrived 20 minutes ahead of the ridiculously early start time because I needed every minute of it when the computer wouldn't allow my login and I had to go through the password reset process. Three times. But the the clocked ticked to 7:30 and everything came together. I was ready to rock and roll. Two few minutes later the colleague who I was afraid would blow me off for the day arrived and announced he'd be there all day. And he kept his word about that, too! And he was fully present, too! "Fully present" meaning leaning in to talk to people who stopped by the booth, rather than hiding at the back with his nose in his phone screen all day. Plus another colleague who isn't even from sales joined us later in the morning and really helped out chatting with customers and prospects in the booth.
One of the metrics our show efforts live or die by is leads— the number of people whose badges we scan when they visit our booth. On the whole for the day our raw number of leads was low (barely 65 when I personally was hoping for 100+) but the quality was extremely high. I've written before about the phenomenon of "swag hounds", people who don't care what our company does and just want the free giveaways. While at some big trade shows that's 80% of the scans, at this show they were, like, 5%. At this conference we talked to many people who are already customers and had the chance to get them excited about new features and new products. We also talked to a number of prospective customers, employees of specific companies we want to sell to, and had solid chats with them about what their challenges are and how our solutions can help.
It was a long day today. I opened the booth at 7:10am and had it packed up at 5:40pm. That's 10.5 hours later! But time kind of flew due to the quality of leads/conversations and the camaraderie of my colleagues who were "all in" with me in chatting with people who visited the booth.
Alas my day was not done when I left the conference venue at 5:40pm. I still had almost 3 hours of driving Wednesday night to get in place for a customer meeting on Thursday morning! At least before leaving town I met Hawk for dinner at a favorite local pizzeria. Neither of us actually had pizza (I had a chicken parm sub and she had cheese fries) but it was great. After that I hit the road for the last leg of a very long day.
